Smart cameras are rapidly finding their way into intelligent surveillance systems. Recognizing faces in the crowd in real-time is one of the key features that will significantly enhance intelligent surveillance systems. The main challenge is the fact that the high volumes of data generated by high-resolution sensors make it computationally impossible for mainstream computers to process. In our proposed technique, the smart camera extracts all the faces from the full-resolution frame and sends the pixel information from these face areas to the main processing unit as a auxiliary video stream - potentially achieving massive data rate reduction. Face recognition software running on the main processing unit then performs the required pattern recognition